An Evolutionary Approach to Social Welfare (Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy) by Christian Sartorius
An Evolutionary Approach to Social Welfare (Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy) by Christian Sartorius
English | Dec 9, 2003 | ISBN: 0415323355 | 263 Pages | PDF | 1 MB
English | Dec 9, 2003 | ISBN: 0415323355 | 263 Pages | PDF | 1 MB
While not evident immediately, social norms and values play a crucial role in the theory of social choice. In the first half of the twentieth century, the special acknowledgement by economic theory of the autonomy of individuals and their subjective view of the world had led to the serious problem that socially acceptable decisions could not be made in the absence of unanimity. In this work, social norms and values are reintroduced to overcome this shortcoming by applying a common standard and, thus, making individual preferences comparable. In particular, it is shown, how the adoption of these standards is part of every individual's social development, how the standards themselves arose in the course of social evolution and how human beings were endowed with the necessary learning mechanism by Darwinian evolution in the first place.